Recommend a good, cheap-ish portable minidisc recorder?

[james0tucson]

Well I agree that Sony's copy protection scheme is a bit irritaiting, but the loosening of restrictions on uploads from user recordings has been a real god send.

Sony eases up a bit on their attempt to control your copyrights and you regard it as a gift from god. I'm not sure we will ever see this problem in the same light. I want to move on from MD, and because of the kind of control Sony tries to exert on my works, I greatly desire to never do business with them again, and I hope to witness their complete demise as a consequence of what they have tried to do. Others are free to have less radical views.

I just digitally download to my pc, convert to wav automatically with Sonicstage and then burn to cd.

The requirement to use Sonicstage is completely unacceptable to me. I'm being very patient, waiting years for an affordable ($400) solid state recorder that puts the wave data in an open format on a standards compliant medium. The Edirol R-1 was the first thing to show any promise, and I was unable to obtain one. I would probably still buy one, but it's been long enough that I expect a second generation model or a reduced price. The M-Audio recorder sounded perfect, but I haven't considered buying it because of reports of noise. The PDAudio system would be great, but it depends on being able to obtain specific models of PDAs -- Len makes that sound easier than it really is.

I have an old MD recorder, and I'm waiting for something better -- but I am *NOT* going to replace it with another Sony MD, certainly not one with only analog out, or that depends on special software to extract the audio, and I hate the feeling that I'm being forced into something like that.

I want a better solution, and I want it eight months ago. Probably wouldn't be having this rant today if Edirol could have delivered the damned R-1. (To order it in June 2005 meant receiving it by the end of December, without guarantees.)

[james0tucson]

Tell me more about using headphones as mics. Do you have any samples of the results? It never occurred to me that it would be practical to try this.

[opia]

http://www.opiadream.com/talk.wav

unclean recording

[deaf dunderkwac]

I used to use sennheiser headset earpieces in the soundholes of pianos for isolation.
That setup worked resonably well...
just plugged them into a direct box to balance the outputs.

[drinelli]

Eh tried doing a search in the hardware part of the forum, no results.

What has been said about it.

I'm looking to get something to make field recordings; looked at the Edirol R-1 and the M-Audio flash-based recorder (don't remmeber the name) and the cheapest I saw them was for around $400, which is too rich for my blood.

[drinelli]

My point in that topic, is that it could be the headphones, or the headphones output that is noisy, as I exsperienced the same with a md recorder I own.

If you used earphones with a different impedance from the standard Sony sets you may get "noise". That's about the only time I've ever got noise other than the music I was playing out of the Sony gear I own. Apart from motor noise when recording with an MD. You'll certainly get noise if you record with earphones rather than a proper mic to.

Spratman

I was using the earphones supplied with the apparatus, and a microphone was not part of it, but when listening to the recorded through the MD, there was a lot of hiss, on the pc there was not, so the md must be more noisy than my soundcard, either that or the earphone was more noisy, I can draw no other conclusion from it.